In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried

“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” traces several significant themes. Friendship figures prominently, especially the tension that arises in a long-term friendship when one friend is terminally ill. This very premise would normally create an expectation of emotional intimacy during the visit, yet from the outset, the narrator is deeply closed off; this at once introduces one of the story’s core ironies and a concomitant sense of emotional disharmony.

It is ultimately the narrator’s profound aversion to death that underpins this disharmony, creating her unease with being in the hospital and seeing her friend’s declining health. Though she doesn’t say it outright (indeed, she states few emotional realities outright), her discomfort expresses itself through several ways. First, she compares her visit to a bank robbery because the hospital room is surveilled by hospital staff through a video monitor (indicating the seriousness of the friend’s condition). Second, both parties must wear masks (indicating the friend’s fragile immune system), and the narrator observes her friend’s skill and comfort at wearing hers, suggesting long-term use; the narrator, in contrast, feels trapped within it (2). Third, when a nurse comments that the friends “could be sisters” (2), the narrator admits (privately, to herself and the reader) that she has waited two months to visit. This last point especially presents key conflicts; it is here that the narrator equates her fear of the visit with her fear not only of death but of looking at death, and here she first exposes her avoidant temperament. Her timidity eventually leads into a contrast with her friend’s usual adventurousness, a trait the narrator reveals through fragmented recollections of the friendship.

Much characterization in the story is indirect; because the narration seldom describes characters’ personalities in explicit terms, the reader often learns by observing the characters’ behavioral patterns or, in the narrator’s case, the tenor of their thoughts. Through a string of vignettes, it emerges that, unlike the hypervigilant narrator, her friend has been the rational one, the one who can formulate a plan to meet virtually every circumstance, the one who can ignore turbulence and continue eating macadamia nuts in flight. The narrator has been the anxious one, the one who fears flying (because of the possibility of crashing), earthquakes, and other unpredictable but unlikely events. As the friends visit on what is likely to be their last time together, the friend asks for frivolous conversational topics and tries to keep the conversation upbeat—but her fear and sadness leak out, climaxing in her retreat to a hospital supply closet.

This is one of the story’s key psychological developments, as the friend’s arc ultimately portrays a failed attempt to mitigate mortality: The friend, who is innately bold and who masks her fear through flippant humor, slowly (if involuntarily) reveals the truth of her vulnerability and fearful despair. She alternately confronts and denies her mortality. She tells morbid jokes about not wanting a gift of a magazine subscription and wishing Kübler-Ross had included resurrection as a step in one’s acceptance of death (3). However, when the narrator mentions she is going home, the friend exposes her sadness and fear of dying. The nurses who find her in the supply closet can offer only trite expressions of comfort, powerless to stop her fate, death.

The narrator, too, is afraid of her own mortality, though her friend’s mortality is partly a proxy for that fear. Moreover, she has delayed her visit for reasons that are hinted at but seldom directly explained. She confesses her fear of “[looking] any closer” (2) at death (that is, observing her friend’s decline), but the delay may also be due to her fear of flying and crashing—a fear that recurs throughout the story—or her inability to accept the impending loss. Her fearfulness is further complicated by her unusually high degree of self-awareness, as she knows her fears don’t justify her avoidance. This engenders her suppressed sense of betrayal, and it redefines the fearfulness as plain cowardice. But, as with her fear, she expresses her guilt obliquely, often through metaphors and analogies: Masking to protect her friend’s fragile health, she compares herself to an outlaw; witnessing a closed-circuit camera that allows nurses to monitor her friend’s needs, she imagines them to be bank robbers.

These analogies create a psychological distance: By imagining a fictional life as a bandit, the narrator escapes the present, sad circumstances. However, the moral dubiousness of the fictional personas—outlaw and robber—reflects the narrator’s troubled conscience with her response to her friend’s suffering. While the friend tries to hide to avoid her fate, the narrator is also hiding, being dishonest with her friend. Like the chimp who uses sign language to avoid blame, the narrator is also being untruthful, hiding her fear and resentment behind silence and deflection—focusing on trivial details (instead of sharing her real feelings), mentally checking out, and planning her escape from the hospital and into the California sunshine by driving a convertible along the Pacific Coast Highway. Her reverie of escape to Malibu blazons her fear of death, though indirectly: The fantasy’s allure derives from its exuberance of life. The scheme flits through her half-guilty, half-thrilled thoughts: “I would shimmer with lust, buzz with heat, life, and stay up all night” (9).

While the narrator’s emotional remoteness from her friend initially has an internal locus (i.e., her own aversion to mortality), the narrator also notices a distance that has creeped into the friendship on her friend’s side. For instance, her friend labels the narrator as “the Best Friend.” The title wounds the narrator because “the impersonal article” (2), the use of the instead of my, suggests she is merely playing a role. It also hurts the narrator because it implies the nurse has overtaken the emotional bond, as she is now a more “intimate” and necessary part of the friend’s life.

The narrator’s fixation on her friend’s language, moreover, hints at another theme: words’ inadequacy to express emotion, which plays into the broader thematic difficulty of communication. Meaning between the friends is often obscure. Rather than expressing themselves straightforwardly, they obfuscate, employ euphemisms, and deflect. They perhaps have no language to describe their respective experiences or have no capacity to earnestly address the concept of death. The narrator never admits to her friend her fear or confusion or grief; her friend, likewise, masks her own terror and loneliness with gallows humor and irreverent cheerfulness. Nevertheless, while literal verbal expression may not adequately convey their pain, both characters could at least attempt directness; instead, they remain opaque.

Both characters’ interpersonal guardedness draws at least partly from their fears, and the narrator especially is timorous. She admits several irrational fears throughout the story. She is scared of flying, which signifies freedom and escape but also signifies lack of control, as passengers entrust a pilot with their safety and arrival. But the concept of “flight” takes on several additional meanings beyond the idea of transportation and metaphor of lacking control: When the friend tries to flee her hospital room—to literally and figuratively escape—the narrator observes that the nurses glare at her. She defensively notes, “I opened the door and the nurses at the station stared hard, as if this flight had been my idea” (9). As the narrative gradually catalogs other anxieties, it also suggests the narrator’s fear of earthquakes has contributed to keeping her from visiting her ill friend, who lives in California, a place of well-publicized earthquakes and where the two have previously lived through one.

The fear of flying is among the story’s most recurrent symbols. As the narrator recalls a dream in which she was not scared of flying, she remembers, “[The plane] takes off at thirty-five miles an hour, and then we’re airborne, skimming the tree tops […] It is so pleasant” (5). The dream represents what is lacking in the narrator’s waking life: a deceleration and scaling down of overwhelming and unpredictable events, such as earthquakes and the friend’s terminal disease.

Finally, after the friend’s death, the narrator enrolls in a class meant to help her conquer her fear of flying. This action is a step toward control over her debilitating fears. Ironically, however, the narrator’s biggest fear is unstated: the fear of death. The story, then, is also an attempt to process and accept death. When the instructor asks the narrator what her biggest fear is, the narrator responds, “That I will finish this course [life] and still be afraid” (9), subtly communicating her fear of never being able to accept her own mortality.

Usually, a protagonist undergoes some pivotal transformation throughout a story; the narrator does change, though neither dramatically nor in the expected way. The narrative doesn’t show her overcoming her fear of death, but it does suggest her slow movement through grief. While she remains compulsively fearful (keeping a glass of water by her nightstand to detect earthquakes), she closes the story by recollecting the chimpanzee who signed messages to her dead child, “fluent now in the language of grief” (10). She understands that her grief, unexpressed while her friend was living, must take another form. She can only address a person who is now forever absent—with words that are inadequate, and though her audience cannot hear her.